Responses to Your EPL Talk Feedback

Less than a week ago, I asked you what EPL Talk could do to improve. Your feedback is vital to the continued success of this blog, so I appreciate you taking time out of your busy day to send in your suggestions.Here are the responses to the suggestions made by the readers:@LemmusLemmus and Django: EPL Talk is definitely very lenient about allowing comments. Interestingly, I delete on average about 5-10 a day before readers even see them — those are pretty vile. I also remove approximately 40-50 posts a day that are spam. But I do let quite a few through that other sites may consider vulgar. I prefer to allow open communication, but it’s something I’ll take a closer look at and will be more apt to delete the abusive comments in the future.@LemmusLemmus, Damir, Chad Looker and Sanjay: The most common suggestion from you, the readers, was to allow the complete post to be displayed on the homepage instead of the “Read More –>” link. Let me explain why I added the “Read More –>” link in the first place. There were two reasons for adding it. One, the homepage is more than 274k in size. The less content that’s displayed on the homepage means that the page will load more quickly especially for readers with slower connection speeds. Second, sometimes the articles that are written are pretty verbose, so some readers may click away before they even get to the stories below a lengthy article.As you may have noticed, I’ve returned to allowing the full post to be displayed on the homepage instead of the truncated version. Let’s see how that goes.@Todd: Yep, I totally agree. Rather than focusing on gossip, scandal, controversy or transfer rumors, I prefer to provide interesting news stories that provide an interesting twist regarding the world of football that we love.@DaveM: I fixed the White Hart Lane 404 error message. Thanks for pointing that out. If you come across any others, please let me know at thegaffer[at]epltalk[dot]com. Regarding the links pointing to the wrong articles, I’ve figured out why it’s doing that, so it should be fixed now. Again, if you come across something that doesn’t work, just let me know and I’ll fix it asap.Dave, no common gateway is planned for the network of EPL Talk sites, but I’ll improve the navigation/links so it serves as a reminder. The sister sites are already getting updated quite often now, so feel free to visit them at championsleaguetalk.com, championshiptalk.com, laligatalk.com, serieatalk.com, soccerondish.com, worldcupbuzz.com and bundesligatalk.com.Dave, we plan on covering the transfer talk during the summer pretty closely. We’ll try and stay away from the rumors as much as possible and report the facts.@Alex and Damir: If bloggers such as Michael has an opinion to share, more power to him. You’re not always going to agree with what he says (or what I say, or other bloggers say), but please be conscientious enough to read the article with an open mind.@Damir: You can always respond to people’s comments by adding an additional comment. In the meantime, I’m looking for some other solutions to comments to add more functionality. I’ll be testing those out within the next week or so.Damir, the only way for the forum to become more popular is for people like you and others to make it popular. As for the recent addition of new advertising sponsors, EPL Talk is a business that needs to pay the bills to keep the lights on. I’ve tried to include the advertising in such a way where it doesn’t detract from the overall experience.One of the differences about EPL Talk is that we try to be as objective as possible. Rather than turn this into a Chelsea or Liverpool loving blog, we try to stay open and comment on topics as we see it without any prejudice. There’s no Premier League club I support, so if you perceive an Arsenal bias, it might be because they deserve the criticism. If the Gunners do something well, we’ll point it out (as we’ve done on numerous occasions in the past).@Wanderer Abroad: For a professional football player who makes more money in 1-2 weeks than most of us do in an entire year, I still stand by my criticism of Nani’s performance for Man United against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. I don’t think I’ve seen a Man United player ever put in such a dire performance in a red shirt before. I stand by my initial comment that his actions that day were disgraceful. If you get a chance to go back and watch the game, pay particular attention to his performance that day. It was completely dreadful.@Chad Looker: EPL Talk tries to write articles on topics or story angles you won’t find elsewhere. Sometimes, though, articles are written on a timely topic such as a match that just finished. While it’s not unique, it acts as a way for people to respond pretty quickly after a match has finished. Most of the times our articles are pretty fresh, and we’ll continue to provide that service in the future.@Utd Fan: Coverage about the Coca-Cola Championship can be found on our sister site, Championship Talk.@Kat Kid: Lonnie Smetana has been doing a great job at updating Champions League Talk more often. Check it out when you get a chance for some great European coverage and analysis.Kat Kid, as for your recommendation about more tactical analysis and discussion, I’m all for it but it’s easier said than done. I’m no tactical genius but if you or someone you know is interested in writing about the topic for EPL Talk, let me know at thegaffer[at]epltalk[dot]com.As for Euro 2008 coverage, we’ll have daily coverage between now and the end of the tournament. Not sure about Olympic coverage, but we’ll see as we get closer to the big event this summer. No plans to write about Celtic unless we start SPL Talk, but I don’t see that happening anytime in the near future.@Django: One of the differentiators about EPL Talk is that it is one of the few sources you can go to for quality information about soccer coverage on cable and satellite. But in the future, we plan on writing more about that on our sister site SoccerOnDish.com rather than on EPL Talk.Lastly, in case you didn’t notice, EPL Talk launched its redesign this past Saturday. The design is similar to the previous one except that this takes up more width on the screen real estate as well as featuring more columns. Other features have been added such as more comments being displayed near the top of the home page (ten latest comments).Thanks again everyone for your valuable feedback.

About The Author

Publisher of World Soccer Talk, Christopher Harris founded the site in 2005. He has been interviewed by The New York Times, The Guardian and several other publications. Plus he has made appearances on NPR, BBC World, CBC, BBC Five Live, talkSPORT and beIN SPORT.
Harris, who was born and raised in Wales, has lived in Florida since 1984, and supported Swansea City since 1979. Last but not least, he got engaged during half-time of a MLS game.

7 Comments

damirMay 12, 2008

that clears up a lot of things…

But you didn’t necessarily have to get rid of the “read more” option.
I was just kind of frustrated that it opened in a new page when i’d click more.
would it still be slow if it opened on the same page, but just kind of extended…?

Appreciate the responsiveness to the feedback Gaffer. Most of my comments were niggling bits, but I appreciate you taking the time to consider and respond. Especially with the cable bit–doesn’t deter me from coming to the site, mostly a harsh reminder of the emptiness of my bank account. Anyhow, keep up the great work, looking forward to the Euro coverage and, of course, August.

Adding the functionality to allow the content to open up on the homepage and then push the rest of the content down to allow space for that can be done, but I would need the help of a professional programmer to do it. It’s better to just go ahead and display the copy on the homepage as-is.

One thing that I’ve been noticing is that somehow the links in the RSS feed are getting muddled or WordPress is cross-linking stories somehow. For example, when I click on the link for the ‘I’m on Setanta Sports..” story from this week…I am redirected to:

I have been visiting the individual “sister sites” today so that my Google Sidebar (RSS / Web Clips gadget) will start to alert me to new postings to each site. …hopefully that will take care of the lack of a common gateway (and the sheer obscurity of the current placement of the links on this page).

…fyi, the RSS feed was picked up immediately for soccerondish, but I’m having trouble with championsleaguetalk (even when I tried to add it manually, it didn’t work). Maybe a google problem, but fyi anyway.

…again, re: sister sites, I know they’re a work in progress, but the formatting of the pages needs serious attention. The articles look okay (on championsleaguetalk, for example) when you’re viewing from the home page – not great, there are problems with text and borders occupying the same space… but it gets much worse when you click on the article itself (then you have text and other text occupying the same space – totally unreadable).

…finally re: sister sites, I see you have given blogger credentials to a lot of new faces. Will it be up to you to moderate the comments? Or are you delegating this to someone? I ask because I tried to post comments and was told it was waiting to be moderated. Useful to censor hurtful comments (such disgracefully calling someone a moron), but it stifles conversation if the comments take long to get past the gatekeeper.

…not complaints – just some things to look at as you make sure the foundations of your budding empire are sound.